While Showtime executives do not traditionally release ratings figures, early estimates for this past week’s “Strikeforce St. Louis: Heavy Artillery” event put the average Showtime viewership at 308,000.

While some MMA pundits have declared the figure a failure and a sign that Strikeforce’s deal with the premium cable channel may be in trouble, sources close to the partnership indicated to MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com) that quite the opposite is true.

While quarter-hour figures, which often rise during mixed martial arts events, were not released, the sources indicated that the “Strikeforce St. Louis: Heavy Artillery” broadcast peaked during the main event of Alistair Overeem vs. Brett Rogers with 448,000 viewers.

That figure represents a 45 percent increase over the current average viewership figure. With Overeem competing in the U.S. for the first time in two-and-a-half years, much of the interest was likely in favor of Brett Rogers, who received a great deal of exposure in his CBS-broadcast matchup with Fedor Emelianenko this past November.

The night’s co-main event featured Antonio Silva vs. Andrei Arlovski, two fighters who have also competed in high-profile fights for Strikeforce, as well as their previous employers.

Spike TV officials proudly announced on Tuesday that the special the basic cable channel ran in a counter-programming slot, “UFC’s Ultimate Fights,” averaged 894,000 viewers.

While the figures would seem to indicate a whitewash for the UFC, Showtime officials apparently do not agree. With the premium cable channel available in only 18 million homes compared to approximately 98.6 million homes for Spike TV, Showtime officials are reportedly pleased with the figures.

“I wouldn’t say it’s irrelevant, but the only fair way to compare the UFC’s show on Spike vs. the show that we did on Saturday is to compare apples to apples, which is to compare our ratings points in our universe vs. the ratings points in Spike’s universe,” DeBlasio said in August. “You know what those numbers are, and you know what the difference in viewership is. But when you compare, our rating was higher than their rating. That’s based on the ratio of subscribers that we have and based on the ration of subscribers that Spike has. As far as (Showtime vice president) Ken (Hershman) and all the executives at Showtime are concerned, that’s a ratings win.

“[Ratings] are a great guide and a benchmark to see what our subscribers like and don’t like, but we don’t live and die by them. That’s for advertising-based networks. They have to sell their product to advertisers. We have to sell our product to subscribers.”

Showtime executives were not immediately available for comment when contacted by MMAjunkie.com.

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